It was a colleague of my sister, who gave us this recipe. Perhaps I shouldn't publicise it if it's a traditional, secret recipe... but a couple of years after sharing it with us they had to ask us for a copy, since they had lost theirs! :-) So I suppose I'm entitled to.
Anyway, this is reaaaaly good stuff. if you don't know what elderflowers taste like, try Fanta Shokata from triple-c. It's carbonated, and with way too much lemon and sugar, has a silly brand name (what's "ShoKata" supposed to mean?) but otherwise it's good. Anyway it's unarguably much better than anything else coming out of the coca-cola company. But now for the real thing: this is what swedish midsummer taste like...
(Suddenly I realise that my english vocabulary is not suited for translating recipes... bear with me. )
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INGREDIENTS
Elderflowers (20 clusters)
1 1/2 l water
2 l sugar
2 lemons
50 g citric acid
Wash the clusters, heat water and sugar until you have a nice fine syrup. Add the citric acid to that. Peel the lemons and grind the peelings. Squeeze the lemons. Pour the syrup over the elderflowers, add the limonade and the grinded peelings. Put in refrigerator for 5 days, covered with a damp cloth (or perhaps glad-pack if you have aromatic things in your refigerator)
Strain it to remove the flowers and lemon seeds etc. Although the citric acid works as a preservative, it doesn't keep all that well - I suggest you freeze some of it. Oh, if you have a big pot, I suggest you double this recipe, because it disappears all too soon.
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In Sweden and Norway, elderflowers bloom in the latter part of june and the beginning of july. It's brobably earlier further south, but the season is not very long, and the early flowers are somewhat better than the later ones. So be prepared.
I don't remember how I came across it, but there is now a version of the old CGA game sopwith made with my favourite platform-independent graphics library SDL. It's at http://sdl-sopwith.sourceforge.net/. The coolest of all? Networking now can be done across regular TCP/IP instead of the proprietary network protocol the original used. I tried it (starting two players on my computer and connecting to myself) and it's cool!
On a similar note, another old game I really liked, Andrew Braybrook's Paradroid, now is cloned - and updated - in SDL. It has higher resolution and better robo-artwork than the original, and also you can use the mouse to shoot diagonally (your opponents could do that in the original, but not you), otherwise it's excactly the same. Ah, I remember the first time I managed to control No 999 :-) . And how tough the second and third storage bays used to be. Full of sentinel droids :-)
Link: http://freedroid.sourceforge.net/
Here comes the source code to the file-reversion program as promised.
It's Scheme. Cool, innit?
I am reading a book called "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid". The first part is interesting, it's much about complexity and formal systems, and Gödels theorems of undecidability in particular. The second part seems to me to be mostly about AI. It's a little disappointing to see the presiscion of the first part give way to the wishful thinking of the second. I am reminded of something my father says: "Mathemathics books never become outdated, physics books become outdated in fifty years, computer science books become outdated in ten years at best". Lots of my comments in the reversed text applies to this second part of the book: It seems to me that they believe that if they make something so complex that they don't really understand it, perhaps it'll think. Lisp is a different way of looking at things, but beware, lest it seduces you onto a trail that leads nowhere.
Thirty years after the book I read was written, LISP has not delievered on it's promises. The world chess champion has been beaten by a computer (the author believed we wouldn't see that in our time), but the program was not written in lisp. In fact, the programs that try to "think like humans" have proved inefficient and weak compared to those that make direct use of computer's strength in number crunching.
But I try to learn Scheme anyway, just as I try to learn Esperanto, even though I don't believe it will solve all the world's linguistic troubles (like some of its adherents believe). It's just that they are fascinating ideas in their own right, even if they are not entirely correct.
(define reverse-file
(lambda (filename) ;x må være en string
(call-with-input-file filename
(lambda (i)
(let loop ((in (read-char i)) (l (list)))
(if (eqv? in eof)
(list->string l)
(begin
(set! l (cons in l))
(loop (read-char i) l))))))))
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